A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, much-anthologized short story by Ernest Hemingway, first published in Scribner’s Magazine in March 1933 and later that year in the collection Winner Take Nothing. Late one night two waiters in a café wait for their last customer, an old man who has recently attempted suicide, to leave. The younger waiter, eager to get home to his wife, turns the old man out, but the older waiter is sympathetic to the human need for a clean, well-lighted place, an outpost in the darkness.

The story is a powerful existential statement about the insufficiency of religion as a source of comfort, and it contains an often cited version of the Lord’s Prayer that substitutes the Spanish word nada (“nothing”) for most of the prayer’s nouns.